Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned. My last post was over two years ago. You find me still obsessed over the subject of that post, the art work Vertigo, by Alfred Hitchcock, which in recent years has come to be considered the Greatest Film Ever Made. “Stand in line,” you say? Yes, there are all too many of us gaga for Madeleine and Judy, and their tragic saga with Scottie. I can’t claim any special status, except for being just a tad extra unhinged in my reverence. Last time, we found me achieving the Valhalla moment of experiencing a super-rare screening of an original IB Tech 35mm print of Hitchcock’s Masterpiece at the Pacific Film Archive. At the time, I felt this to be the ultimate payoff of a fascination beginning at the age of seventeen, when I got my first movie theater job at the Aquarius Theatre in Palo Alto. I’d just seen Vertigo there for the first time during its long-in-coming re-release in 1984, and it still played the Aquarius for some weeks after I got hired. Between bouts of hawking Coke and popcorn, I’d go in to catch little bits of Hitchcock sorcery. While I’d been moved by that initial screening, now I found myself captivated and entranced by AH’s legendary Mastery. And falling just a bit in love, for in Madeleine and Judy we had two — and, hence, all — women in one.

Cut to decades later. It’s July 5th (Independence Hangover Day) of this present month and year. I get out of a Sunday afternoon screening at the PFA, and power on my phone. Two increasingly desperate messages greet me from my landlords: the apartment below the one I share with my wife and eight-year-old daughter has water gushing from every pore of its ceiling. Maybe we left the faucet in the tub on? I rush back to San Francisco to find firemen have used a ladder to enter our kitchen, and have discovered the source of the problem: a burst pipe in the apartment above ours. Our apartment is thoroughly flooded, and due to various issues, our kitchen and bathroom will have to be redone. Our landlords generously offer to house us for the interim in a hotel of our choosing. Where to go? It’s the height of tourist season, and insurance companies might take issue with the Fairmont or Mark Hopkins. Finally, we settle on the Hotel Vertigo. I’d long been fascinated by this site, built, as I understand it, in the 20s as the Hotel Empire, and appearing under that name as Judy’s residential hotel in Hitchcock’s film. Working one block over at Kayo Books for ten years, I’d inevitably find myself venturing up the hill to check it out under its later incarnation as the York. When it morphed into the Hotel Vertigo in 2009, I have to admit to being a little disturbed: Judy’s Hotel Empire was being Disney-theme-park-icized. I even tended to avoid that block of Sutter St. for a spell. But now, after the levee broke, it was time to reconsider.

Installed in a back corner room on the sixth floor, we couldn’t have been happier: it was very quiet, and the bay windows opened onto a Rear Window-type backyard-scape, only without visibly enticing or murderous neighbors. Then my girls went out of town for a few days, and I began to feel lonely, even a bit Jack Torrence-y. I began scouting out the hotel in search of mysteries… The elevator’s wallpaper was somewhat in the style of Ernie’s, the restaurant in which Scottie first spots Madeleine, and to which he later takes Judy. (Ernie’s was still open as of when I first brought my wife to San Francisco, but, alas, we never made it inside — back then we were among the vast army of youth which knows not how to properly fear the ravages of time.) The hotel is bedecked with many statues and statuettes (including ones fashioned into lamps) of various animals, especially horses. These seem to reference the plaster horse in Vertigo‘s Mission San Jaun Bautista‘s stable. Each room features a graphic spiral/swirl design rendered onto glass, and mounted on the wall, as painting/sculpture installations. These were some of the obvious features, accessible to all. Then I noticed the room next to the elevator on my floor was named “The Madeleine.” On the floor above, and immediately above “The Madeleine,” I found “The Scottie”. Immediately below these was “The Gavin,” and below them all was “The Carlotta”. Notice something missing? Yep, no “Judy”. How could this be? This bizarre situation led me to two thoughts: 1) 70s Halloween costumes: when I was a kid growing up in the 70s, if you wanted to be Batman or Spider-Man, say, you couldn’t get a mini replica of the real thing. All that was available was some kind of “artist’s abstraction.” As a kid, I hated this, and wanted only the real thing. Now, far from those days, I love those costumes, and only wish I could go back home again to get at them… Hotel Vertigo is a lot like 70s Halloween costumes, and of course I mean this in a good way. 2) I had to find the real “Judy room.” With help from the gracious staff, I figured out which room it was, and a couple days later, we were able to move in.

The first moments were a bit like those when Judy steps out of her bathroom costumed as Madeleine, with her hair up: this was THE room, the real room, Hitchcock and his art directing team had scouted, and were at least partially trying to recreate on the studio stage. The green neon “Hotel Empire” sign is long gone, but the room features gauzy curtains over the bay windows framing the view the filmmakers did a superb job of realistically recreating. How can I express what it meant to be here, after these past decades in cultic thrall to the most potently twisted moments in moviedom? I’ve had psychogeographic thrills and chills galore before — especially in my adventures with Brian Darr for Open Space, in which we tracked down the many locations of the most undervalued masterpiece of all time, Christopher Maclaine’s The End. But now I was inhabiting a room in which Judy/Kim Novak once stood, with Mr. Hitchcock standing nearby to give direction. (Kim Novak is said to have later stayed in this room during her occasional visits to SF.) A friend aptly describes it as the “Tristan and Isolde room.” That evening, I watched my daughter play solitaire, sitting in a position very similar to Judy’s at the top of this post.

Was it perhaps at this point I decided it might be time to share Vertigo with her? The hotel provides a player, and a DVD with the essential original mono soundtrack as an added feature. I’ve done my best to foster a reputation as at least a semi-film-purist, and I was holding out hope to share it with her in the form of a future IB Tech screening. But how could we not watch it with her in the Judy room? It was kind of a touch-and-go situation, though. After hearing the adults prattle on about it for so long, she thought it would be too scary, or “too adult and boring.” Finally, she was won over by having it described as a “long, non-scary Twilight Zone episode, but with gorgeous color.” As it turns out, she was involved the whole two hours and eight minutes, and afterwards, though saddened by the denouement, declared it “surprisingly good.” (It of course helped that she’d been to so many of its locations, including the room in which we were watching it.) After we’d talked about it for a little while, I inevitably succumbed to the temptation to attempt the eloquent waxing: “You see, what Vertigo‘s about is the tragedy of…” I trailed off, daunted at the task I’d set myself. How to explain my Jung-derived ideas to an eight-year-old? I was thinking along the lines of how internal images of the soul for men (the anima) are projected onto real women, none of whom can live up to them, if, that is, they can be procured in the flesh. In Vertigo, a man is the victim of a fraud in which a woman who seems to embody all aspects of his anima is set before him, then yanked away, seemingly into death. The woman involved in this plot is meanwhile falling in love with her victim. How could she have known beforehand that Scottie would embody her animus, the contrasexual masculine image of her soul, in person before her? I was musing on the horrific sadness of all this, and how it corresponds symbolically on such a profound level with human life as it’s experienced from day to day, but how to express it to a little girl? And hence my “It’s about the tragedy of…” went dangling. “…Of living and loving?” my daughter suggested. First time out of the gate, and the eight-year-old hit the nail square on the head.

These are scary, vertiginous times in San Francisco. The identity of the city seems to be in flux, yet there is much still to be cherished, loved as it really is. Like many others, I and my family are swooning with the uncertainty, but, despite all, we’re making the most of an unfortunate situation, and are also swooning in thrall to a cultic experience. For the time being, if wishing to reach us, send all mail to the Hotel Vertigo, attn.: The Judy Room.

]]>http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/07/vertigo-obsession-pt-2-the-judy-room/feed/0http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/07/vertigo-obsession-pt-2-the-judy-room/Nothing That Meets the Eye: Double Troublehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sfmoma/blog/~3/-XzkMdjTkZg/ http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/nothing-that-meets-the-eye-double-trouble/#commentsTue, 23 Jun 2015 16:27:36 +0000http://openspace.sfmoma.org/?p=59951“Nothing That Meets the Eye” is a series of essays in which I think through the aesthetic and affective fallout of some of the odder, ubiquitous, and more stubborn byproducts of our culture of copies, reproductions, and fakes.

It is only fitting that I end this series back where it began, in the presence of Elaine Sturtevant’s work. This time I’m in Los Angeles, at LACMA’s installation of Double Trouble, the MOMA retrospective I first caught back in December of last year. Both iterations of the exhibition oddly mirror the general architectural character of the cities in which they’re installed: whereas MOMA’s smaller galleries were chockablock with pieces, MOCA’s larger, white-walled rooms allow them to be more spread out. Walking into the MOMA installation felt like entering a funhouse, your attention diverted ten different ways as flashes of recognition (“Look, it’s a Warhol.” “Look, it’s Beuys.”) gave way to interference (“Look, it’s not-Warhol.” “Look, it’s not-Beuys.”). With only a few pieces to a room, the LACMA installation softens the immediate impact of encountering Sturtevant’s work in the aggregate while allowing the sharpness of particular pieces to become more pronounced.

The wall text next to an untitled 1987 painting after Keith Haring — its content non-figurative but its lines still energetic in a way that is immediately recognizable — notes that it’s one of the first works Sturtevant made after a near decade-long hiatus. (This was a detail I didn’t catch the first time around; I might have even overlooked the painting). The wall text states Sturtevant was weary of simplistic readings of her work that cast it as mere copies or limited their range to, in her words, “reviewing history.” It goes on to quote her as remarking: “People who look at art see it as a detail, a painting or a group of paintings by a specific artist. They rarely see art as part of a total phenomenon. They don’t use horizontal thinking.”

The museum retrospective of a single artist’s work, by its very format, necessarily encourages such a limited appraisal. At the same time, Sturtevant’s art plays off the ambivalence of her phrasing: “a certain artist” could just as well refer to her as to any of the artists whose work her own metabolized. Bruce Hainley (who might be Sturtevant’s greatest chronicler) makes the point in his meticulously researched exhibition catalog, Under the Sign of [Sic.] (2014), that Sturtevant was always thinking horizontally. Her canny insertion of her own practice alongside the practices of her contemporaries — some welcoming (Rauschenberg), others charmed (Warhol), others hostile (Oldenberg) — was not merely a process of imitation. Sturtevant created a destabilizing force field around their work, setting into motion all the elements that made up the “total phenomenon” within which the singular work of art was ensconced and enabled: not only the particularity of one artist’s materials and methods of production, but the larger mis-en-scène of interpersonal relationships, critical debate, and economic transactions within which their art was being made, reviewed, exhibited, and collected.

The challenge I set for myself in this series was to think through replication and its contemporary discontents horizontally, one segment at a time — to account for “what isn’t seen in what you see,” as Hainley puts it, when “what you see isn’t what you see at all” (Hainley, 84). Admittedly, my field of vision has been geographically and culturally limited to American artists and artifacts, many of whom have a particular resonance within the Bay Area. Curiously, I have overtly avoided writing about art on/and/against/after the Internet. I have also demurred from tackling the obvious: globalization, and the resulting circulation and recirculation of knocked-off goods, imitations-on-demand, and authorized copies through foreign and domestic markets. For example, Winnie Won Yin Wong, in Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (2013) — a book I dearly wish I had had the time to more properly engage with— notes that 90% of the reproduced masterpieces created in the Chinese city of Dafen for export are shipped to the U.S., the copied canvases installed in hotels, law firms, and planned communities or sold at box stores. Globalization too is a total phenomenon — perhaps, the total phenomenon insofar as it aspires toward totality — and from which contemporary art is inextricable, the ether into which the autonomous art object has dematerialized only to rematerialize as something like, but not quite, itself. [1]

Sturtevant’s art practice can be read as a kind of sonar, used to track the fluctuating coordinates of the art object as it continues to reappear between substance and presence. As such, it is more interested in posing challenges to how we know what we see than it is in overtly drawing attention to the economic or ideological forces which condition ways of knowing or seeing (although it keeps tabs on them too, particularly in regards to the gendered politics of art making). Sturtevant’s signature move—could it even be said that she has one—is to pull the rug from beneath our feet, Looney Toons-style, to reveal the gray void we’ve been standing above all along, what Hainley calls “a rift and/or vantage” (40). Her choice of Haring as the artist who got her back into the game is interesting, then, because within her deceptively simple re-presentation of his work there is an accentuation that is, at least, incipiently political, to the extent that it is underwritten by a certain care.

As with her 1987 painting, Sturtevant’s other Harings are based on pieces devoid of the scenes of conflict, catastrophe or violence seen in much of his more “overtly political” work. More so than with her engagement of other artists, Sturtevant’s Harings are exercises in style which raise questions about the efficacy of encountering Haring’s work in an institutional setting at all, let alone on a refrigerator magnet or T-shirt. The “rift and/or vantage” provided by Sturtevant’s take on Haring reminds us that although his work unequivocally critiqued the ravages of capitalism, its very reproducibility and eventual commodification complicated the clarity of that critique’s broadcast and reception. Harings’s political and artistic commitments were, it turns out, increasingly in tension as he achieved greater success and renown, something which the recent hagiographic survey, Keith Haring: The Political Line, too easily glossed over. Striking a somewhat similar note, Sturtevant’s versions of readymade pieces by another gay male artist who has become inseparable from the AIDS crisis — Felix Gonzalez-Torres — places renewed emphasis on the expectancy and absence that swirled around the originals. Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Go-GO Dancing Platform) and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, AMERICA AMERICA (both from 2004) are no less poignant for not being attributable to Gonzalez-Torres, whose work often metonymically substituted people with things. Substitutes in their own right, Sturtevant’s versions still make their presence count; her light bulbs, like Gonzalez-Torres’s, also emit heat.

At the same time, Sturtevant’s versions also act as mirrors, reflecting back my personal investments in Gonzalez-Torres and Haring and making me self-conscious about my eagerness to ascribe a political dimension to the care that she clearly took in creating her likeness of their work (indeed, care is evident in all of her work, even when the results are more outwardly irreverent). Do I find Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Go-GO Dancing Platform) affecting because I find Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) so affecting? Or is it all the more affecting because it serves as a tribute to a dead artist for whom, like Haring, death was political (and, like Haring, whose death was itself political), who strategically mobilized technologies of mass production and reproduction to stage new forms of personal and collective remembrance?

I want to say that the answer is “both”, but that would imply a certain closure that Sturtevant’s art forestalls. Rather, engaging with her work affords me a vantage from which to continually and critically think through why certain artists matter to me, in addition to the recognition, importance or canonization already conferred upon them by their presence in an institution or proliferation within culture at large. Her art throws out given metrics and demands a fresh reckoning with value that takes into account personal significance as well as cultural capital. Gauging the distance between the two becomes the challenge and reward of spending time with Sturtevant’s work, as it has been with writing these essays about the capacity of non-genuine things to elicit very real effects (not the least of which are something as readily mobilizable as emotions). In both instances, this feeling of productive disorientation is perhaps best summed up by John Cage’s remarks about his composition Cheap Imitation (1969), a cheekily titled takeoff of Erik Satie’s Socrate (1919) that doubles as a tribute: “In the rest of my work I’m in harmony with myself [...] But Cheap Imitation clearly takes me away from all that. So if my ideas sink into confusion, I owe that confusion to love.”

I’d like to thank the editors and readers of Open Space for giving me the chance to fall out of harmony with my own inclinations and habits as a writer and for being willing to follow along as I sorted through a confusion born of deep affection. My inquiry may have periodically enthused over the fake, but my gratitude has remained genuine.

Notes:

[1] This is not to overlook the salient differences between Sturtevant’s versions of other artists’ work and the copies produced by the painters of Dafen. It could be argued that however much Sturtevant’s work challenges many commonly held assumptions about modern art, it still issues that challenge from within a “high art” framework, whereas the paintings exported from Dafen are mass market knockoffs. Wong, however, ambitiously makes the case that the work of Dafen painters should be seen as no less than the product of individual artists (as opposed to “merely” workers) who have full agency over their creative production. Why, Wong asks, should these artists be disqualified as such for responding to market demands, when the same could be said of other blue chip businessmen such as Ai Weiwei or Jeff Koons (who also run their studios as factories), simply because there is no big name attached to their output or because they don’t outwardly justify the copying central to their practice by claiming lineage to a post-Duchampian conceptualism?

]]>http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/nothing-that-meets-the-eye-double-trouble/feed/1http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/nothing-that-meets-the-eye-double-trouble/Five-Tone Kit: Lewis Watts & Casualhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sfmoma/blog/~3/4hx3e0VyHaU/ http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/five-tone-kit-lewis-watts-casual/#commentsFri, 19 Jun 2015 16:30:13 +0000http://openspace.sfmoma.org/?p=59935This five-part series — named after a section of composer Lou Harrison‘s (1917-2003) Rhymes With Silver — pairs an image of San Francisco from the SFMOMA Collection with a piece of music also created in or indebted to the Bay Area at large. Subjectively construed, open to intimacy and conflict, these selections are fleeting studies in aural-geographic-temporal synonymy and disjunction. They’re also intended for the weekend, toward whatever end/opening.

Lewis Watts, <i>Joe’s Installation</i>, West Oakland, 1993

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For the last installment of “Five-Tone Kit”, we’re East Bay-bound.

In the West Oakland of 1993, photographer Lewis Watts captured an unusual street (park?) installation by an enigmatic “Joe”.

1993 was moreover a remarkable year for hip hop in the Bay Area and across the country. From Wu-Tang to A Tribe Called Quest to Tupac to the Alkaholiks to De La Soul to E-40, it represents a crucial time in the history of an ever-evolving artform. Notably, it’s an Oakland group that is credited with the most enduring slogan of that time: “93 ’til Infinity“.

That group, Souls of Mischief, remain part of a larger East Bay hip hop collective, Hieroglyphics (still going strong), which also includes MCs like Del tha Funkee Homosapien and Casual. Above, Casual performs a track off of 2004′s The Hierophant at Amoeba Records in Berkeley, bringing some special guests with him.

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Obviously, this series has only scratched the surface. The Bay Area’s musical history is a complex one, rife with overlaps and anomalies. A helpful (albeit mostly defunct) resource on Bay Area experimental music history can be found here.

Surely the musical/sound art landscape of the Bay Area will continue to change and grow in unpredictable ways. But as the late Robert Ashley — another one-time Oakland resident — put it: “the landscape has to be there.“

This fired the imagination and even sounded possible, in part because around this same time director Darren Aronofsky had been somewhat secretly working on preproduction for a Batman movie. It was to be grim street-level film drawing inspiration from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and with a script based on Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One. Some of the concept art that was produced for the movie was recently made public; unfortunately the film was ultimately canceled on account of its being too violent and not suitable for a PG-rating.

Beyond the context of a Batman film, architects Bryan Cantley and Kevin O’Donnell were trying to both explore and convey the idea of presenting architectural forms as something transcending one single form set in time and space, and more as a series of optional ways for forms to fill space, a sort of representation of a collection of possibilities.

The work feels expansive in its exploration of form: black plastic beams stretching out as connective tissue, hinting at some supposed real-world function, while empty space demonstrates impossible constructions and fictional realities.

By linking the work to the Batman mythos, it also inadvertently connected this series of pieces to the idea of the transcendental Batman, the modern day symbolic demigod whose iconography one can find everywhere. But in its comic book roots, writers and artists continue to use this fiction as a means of exploring a wide variety of “options” in both storytelling and characterization. Most notably, contemporary writer Grant Morrison argued that every Batman story, no matter how strange, goofy, or bizarre, “happened” to the same individual, that all these “options” were valid. Instead of characterizing this individual as insane, Morrison presented the concept that the “idea” of Batman was alchemically greater than all its parts, that the self-development of a variety of personalities allowed him to stay sane in the face of trauma and chaos. Beyond the individual personality of Bruce Wayne, the symbolic “Batman” identity was a role that others could take on. It was human potential developed to its greatest apex: a body trained to perfection, a mind trained to perfection, but still intrinsically human.

“Batman thinks of everything. Batman even prepared for psychological attack with a backup identify, remember? He made a secret self to save him.” — Grant Morrison, Batman #679

Batman was an idea that could never die, and will continue on beyond Bruce Wayne, beyond any flesh and blood person. It was an idea transmitted both by artists and storytellers, and by audiences and observers.

In his book Supergods, Morrison discusses Count Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man as urging us to look beyond the human, to see the options for superhuman as an intrinsic part of our nature, as part of our evolution: “Pico is telling us about the power of stories and imagination to reshape our future[...] We learn much from our fictional role models as we do from the real people who share our lives.” He goes on to write that superheroes “are a powerful living idea — a meme, to use the terminology of Richard Dawkins that has propagated itself from paper universes into actuality, with unknown consequences.”

Form:uLA Dimension Laboratory, Studio, <i>Batman Model 1</i>, 2000

Form:uLA’s conception of the Batman hybrid models as a “stream of one idea merging with many” resonates with these ideas of aspirational influences and the potential of a self-actualized identity. Both feel like a step away from an object/observer relationship with the hybrid models reflecting this being “self-referential and self-critical architectural composites — architecture that exists to examine both itself and the formal nature of architecture.” Both seem to embrace the exploration of possibility, opening up dialogue and “battering the walls between reality and fiction before our very eyes.”

An interesting tangent: the most recent Batman film just wrapped production, and apparently the director was inspired to donate the sets to be repurposed as bat-houses for bats threatened by a disease called “white nose syndrome.” It’s hard to ascribe motive to such an act. But I like think just working on a project focused on aspirational characters inspired the director to take these transitory and ethereal architectural models (writ large) and transform them into practical aid for animals as well as awareness- and fundraising tools. Apparently the accompanying PSA has already helped raise $14 million for bat conservation.

Leef Smith grew up in ’70s hippy San Francisco with hand-made clothes, a vegetarian diet and progressive politics, as well as Legos, Star Wars and comic books, starting with Tintin. Later he was drawn into contemporary mainstream comics by the X-Men and Crisis on Infinite Earths, and the rich complexity they offered. In 2009 he opened Mission: Comics & Art, a comic book shop combined with an art gallery.

]]>http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/collection-rotation-leef-smith/feed/0http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/collection-rotation-leef-smith/Five-Tone Kit: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon & Anthony Braxtonhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sfmoma/blog/~3/RFOVFgI8ixQ/ http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/five-tone-kit-barbara-stauffacher-solomon-anthony-braxton/#commentsFri, 12 Jun 2015 16:30:18 +0000http://openspace.sfmoma.org/?p=59918This five-part series — named after a section of composer Lou Harrison‘s (1917-2003) Rhymes With Silver — pairs an image of San Francisco from the SFMOMA Collection with a piece of music also created in or indebted to the Bay Area at large. Subjectively construed, open to intimacy and conflict, these selections are fleeting studies in aural-geographic-temporal synonymy and disjunction. They’re also intended for the weekend, toward whatever end/opening.

This week’s edition of “Five-Tone Kit” finds relation in segmentation — a paradoxical endeavor, no doubt. Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s From the Marina Green to Pacific Heights uses the “hard lines” of her graphic design background toward a kind of cartographical abstraction, ambiguously representing two proximal regions of San Francisco.

Anthony Braxton, meanwhile, is no stranger to the possibilities afforded by distribution via graphical segmentation. The multi-instrumentalist and composer, who taught Composition at Mills College in the ’80s, is known in part for the precise and apparently systematized obscurantism of his scores, which are characterized by eccentric numbering and mapping devices (e.g. some suggest physical arrangements for performers standing onstage). For Trio represents not only this tendency via its cover, but also aesthetically conveys it quite effectively: this is a music of starts and stops, of blocks of sounds and textures, of bracketing silences. To borrow the title of Cecil Taylor’s well-known album, what one finds here are unit structures, protean collaborations bent on fleeting constructions.

In their totality, the series and surveys of photographer Lewis Baltz detail an entropic world of chaotic construction and semi-domestic (and semi-domesticated) landscape. He is known for black and white photos which depict a humanity-free, dead/dying landscape with faux-objectivity and clinical silence. Embodying true nastiness and anger beneath their fussy surfaces, Baltz’s pictures of homes and garbage contain a certain kind of subtle evil; they stare you in the eye and don’t blink.

“I used photography to distance myself from a world that I loathed and was powerless to improve.” [1]

On reading about Baltz’s death in November 2014, I was surprised by this quotation — drawn from a 2009 oral history interview — frequently cited in obituaries and referring to his early work on Southern California suburban and industrial landscapes. I had never heard this line before, and was struck by its blatant emotionality. I’d long been deeply interested in and engaged with Baltz’s work, but this made me sit up with renewed interest. It was re-inspiring, specifically in its newly revealed nihilism, coming as it was from a man whose work had seemed to me so studiously non-expressive and whose work has been treated so analytically by many of his critics. Elsewhere in the same interview Baltz elaborates: “Dealing with this [through photography] was a kind of exorcism. It was a way […] you could at least try to make an aesthetic sense. […] It was a way of getting rid of something.”

This crazy intellectualized nihilism. The obsessive and fastidious aesthetic examination and cataloging of nothingness. So fascinating then, and so exciting to be fascinated anew after finding these new words to work around (and yes, sad to see this side of the artist only on the occasion of his death). Also a SoCal kid (twenty-five or so years behind Baltz) long before I’d heard of the guy — and long before I entered the fray of desperate urban living — I thought that perhaps I too would grow up to be a photographer, by which I mean that maybe I would wander the wasteland, document the suburban world’s houses and parking lots in snappy black and white, float in warm evening atmospheres and be a perennially lonely romantic. I thought a lot about the air above our heads and the size of buildings, about front yards as expressive sculpture and about the brackish borders at the edges of communities. Suburban architecture fascinated with its uniformity. I loved the hypothetical warmth inside homes, but the dark exteriors felt more realistic and sincere (not that I was happy about this). I was well aware that, as an architectural culture, we were communicating with aliens and gods as much as the Cahokians and Nazca. I felt a sense of (possibly misplaced) obligation to decode these messages for posterity (if not just for myself).

On discovering Baltz’s work circa 1992 — largely in the form of his mid-career monograph Rule Without Exception — I felt that I got it, or rather that I began to get it. I’m still feeling that way, still feeling like I’m getting it. It’s taking a while, but like some slow poison it continues to infiltrate and solidify. At first I felt he was simply saying, even with a whisper, “look.” A little while later I thought: He’s staring something down. Even later, I realized that there was something else at work here, something about holding a mirror up, reflecting the world back, showing the world back to the world, even if no one is there to get it. Bernard Lamarch-Vadel, in an essay included in Rule Without Exception, compares Baltz to Warhol in that both “confide to their images the exclusive task of presenting that which is already there.” [2] I believe Baltz takes the “expressionlessness” of this gaze even further, treating his images (sometimes referred to as “forensic”) as evidence, if not as evidence of crimes then as evidence of violations: violations of decorum, violations of dignity, crimes against nature, errors, evolutionary wrong turns, and just bad ideas. [3]

Baltz’s work opened a world for me that involved flatness, expressive non-expressivity, silence, repetition, organization and cataloging, inventory. The deadpan stare as a marker of disapproval made a lot more sense to me than the violent outbursts my punker friends were making — and for what it’s worth, it felt more honest. Looking at a few of these images, my thoughts wander and twist into the darkness at the edge of town…

Model Home, Shadow Mountain (1977; above): A slumping home, clearly on the edge of something, feeling somewhat warm and somewhat threatening, calming like a realist Thomas Kinkade. [4] Does a family shudder and turn on electric light against the exterior dark? Do they crawl under blankets and cower? Do they sigh and kiss goodnight? Do animals prowl their yard and kill their cats? Outside the world and the sky and the photographer hover and hesitate.

The home is like something warm and furnace-like. Can we crawl inside, place ourselves inside and therein be warmly roasted? A calm hill and a strangely glowing yet flat white sky loom over and radiate their cool presence. A cooling and hardening sky. The blankness, and something behind the blankness, something akin to the raging depressions that might be behind the walls.

Jump to the interior. Not of this house but why couldn’t it be? Evolution in reverse.

A singing interior. A ringing box. This could be an installation in an art gallery somewhere (but it’s not). Walls activated with haptic gestural daubs, the floor littered with random detritus, this chaos in contrast with the inserted pre-fab ornament (the modular faux-rustic fireplace), the long and dark cross beam — taking measure? Holding the place together? Pushing it apart? [5]

This photo recalls another of Baltz’ works, also from Park City (1980): constellations, galaxies, nebulae discovered in the walls of an unfinished home, suggesting expansiveness and containment, denial and repression of the cosmic. And an ominous central rectangle — a window opening into the world beyond, but so photographically overexposed as to appear a blank screen. It’s a site of potential, but mutely and pessimistically presented, much like an empty drive-in theater overgrown with weeds; like Peter Miller’s Projector Obscura (2005), which uses the projector as a camera in order to produce a blank movie screen; like the cinematic rectangle described by Hollis Frampton in A Lecture (1968). Of course I wouldn’t know about these works until years later — after I’d split the suburbs (and drifted away from my obsession with photography) — but the photo — like many of Baltz’s photos — seems to be waiting for someone. [6]

Down the road, beneath a similar coiling hill, wagons circle a roadhouse as evening encroaches:

A broken glass tube as a gesture of surrender, a way of giving up. Apparently run over by a car or truck, nonetheless I imagine a gentle crushing noise as the tube gives up the ghost, shrugs itself into dust, into earth, into a line of powder marking its last resting place, as well as its former status as engineered and constructed object, as a paragon of human engineering. I imagine the gentle crush of the glass.

They say there’s poisonous gas in those tubes and that you ought not to break them. If broken, the results could be disastrous. Mercury vapor escaping with a gentle tinkling crush of glass, wafting its desolation over the world. The end comes too soon, but — sadly, asymptotically — it also seems never to arrive.

[6] Notably (for me), this image in turn also recalls Jeff Wall’s An Octopus/Some Beans, a diptych which similarly seems to locate the untouchable universe in a sheet of rotten plywood.

Steve Polta — sometime filmmaker, former San Francisco taxi driver — is the Artistic Director of San Francisco Cinematheque. He holds a BA in Film Studies from UC Berkeley, an MFA in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters of Library and Information Science degree from San Jose State University. His writings on film have been published in INCITE! A Journal of Media and Radical Aesthetics; Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945–2000; and Un­Dependently Yours: Imagining a World Beyond the Red Carpet.

]]>http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/darkness-at-the-edge-of-town-steve-polta-on-lewis-baltz/feed/0http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/darkness-at-the-edge-of-town-steve-polta-on-lewis-baltz/Nothing That Meets the Eye: Notes on Cloneshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sfmoma/blog/~3/fRjxIxpXivw/ http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/nothing-that-meets-the-eye-notes-on-clones/#commentsWed, 03 Jun 2015 16:10:31 +0000http://openspace.sfmoma.org/?p=59876“Nothing That Meets the Eye” is a series of essays in which I think through the aesthetic and affective fallout of some of the odder, ubiquitous, and more stubborn byproducts of our culture of copies, reproductions, and fakes.

“Taste has no system and no proofs,” writes Susan Sontag at the outset of “Notes on Camp” (1964). “Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea . . .”

Part of what I am interested in tracing across this series is what happens after sensibilities harden into ideas, or into something else. What Sontag warns against is essentially a process of replication: the “mold of a system” is there to transform one kind of matter into the likeness of something else entirely. When ideas (or, say, a particular work of art) are repeated across different forms and mediums, those repetitions, in turn, produce their own kinds of effects, both spectacular and lackluster. The extent to which what has been re-presented is recognizable as iterative, or recognizable at all (“this looks like a/an X”), also arouses mixed feelings. As many after Freud have observed, things that come back or reappear can be unsettling precisely because they are familiar, close to home.

•

The man in the photograph appears to be in his late twenties or early thirties. His mustache is bushy enough to make it hard to pinpoint his age, but not so overgrown as to obscure a sweet smile. His Levis, like the rolled up sleeves of his flannel shirt and his unzipped hoodie, are relaxed; fitted but not too revealing. He leans against a wall, the sharply angled sidewalk beneath his black Converse forcing the rest of him into a kind of lazy contrapposto that is simultaneously sexy and goofy.

He is — as the white, all-caps text in the lower bottom left of the photograph states — an exemplar of “BASIC GAY” street style circa 1977. That’s the year when San Francisco artist Hal Fischer created the image as part of his Gay Semiotics photography project, currently on view again in San Francisco, at Ratio 3, after nearly forty years. The man’s clothing and grooming, as the composite of image and text dictates, make him an identifiable type among other types and in regard to other men who look like him. He could be called, using the parlance of the time, a clone.

•

“The gay culture’s new visibility has exposed a subculture developing its own myths, cultural heroes, stereotypes and sign language (semiotic),” writes Fischer, in an accompanying essay. Gay Semiotics nailed the subcultural shift that had occurred in the near-fifteen years since “Notes on Camp” and near-decade since the Stonewall Riots: Sontag’s marginal sensibility, cobbled together from the cultural discard pile, was still marginal but had morphed into something more codified, something that traded on desirability rather than abjection.

Enter the clone. The clone was, in Martin P. Levine’s appropriately science fiction-inflected phrasing, “the first post-Stonewall form of homosexual life.” With their masculine self-presentation (Levis, facial hair, gym-toned bodies, flannel shirts, leather accessories or gear) that projected sexual self-assuredness and availability, “clones came to symbolize the liberated gay man.” At the same time, the clone look — with its perceived repudiation of anything swishy, faggy, or feminine — was criticized as an expression of gayness that was at best severely limiting, and at worst, self-hating and fascist. In fact, gay activist and scholar Arthur Evans meant the term to be derisive when he coined it in the “Red Queen” broadsides he wheatpasted around the Castro in the late seventies. The word still comes off as pejorative, though its sting has dulled with time.

•

The gay clone, illustrated.

“The taxonomic imagination frequently risks defeat at the hands of its own classificatory zeal,” writes Tim Dean in an essay on clones and the radical potential of queer sameness. The self-awareness that runs through Gay Semiotics puts its visual anthropological study of the markers of gay sexuality and identity on just such a knife’s edge. Arranged and organized by subject matter (“Archetypal Media Images,” “Signifiers,” “Street Fashion,” and “Fetish”), the series’ twenty-four sharply composed black and white photographs look as if they have been lifted from a fashion or porn magazine. Each is overlaid with dry explanatory text and diagrammatic labels that subject the archetypes gay men fashioned themselves after — along with their sexual symbols, accoutrements and practices (e.g. hanky codes, BDSM, poppers) — to the same ambivalent surveillance with which Ed Ruscha rounded up Los Angeles gas stations and parking lots.

The academic frame of image and text Fisher put around these “myths, cultural heroes, stereotypes and sign language” creates a second-order index. Just as a red handkerchief in a rear pocket is no longer just a red handkerchief if worn on the left by a gay man, Fischer’s photograph and gloss of said handkerchief (in black-and-white, no less) simultaneously foregrounds the object and the practice while leaving only the “gay man” fully in view. Gay Semiotics preached to the choir in an outsider’s language, re-estranging that which cruising the streets and the backrooms of bars — behaviors and rituals that created “a form of homosexual life” — had made re-familiar.

•

An opinion piece in The Advocate from a few years back wonders if the clone has remained a constant aspect of gay culture, even if its outward appearance has changed over time. Dean’s psychoanalytic reading of the clone (following Leo Bersani’s) arrives at a similar conclusion by a different route, positing the clone as a timeless ideal that can ultimately illuminate our understanding of difference. I find the historical materialism at the core of the former thesis more compelling than the liberation promised by the latter. Dean’s argument is far more finessed, but I am more interested in what is taken up and what is left behind.

One of the most fascinating parts of the Ratio 3 exhibition are the large vitrines filled with printed matter from Fischer’s archive, among other sources, which shows the many ways in which Gay Semiotics has been cloned throughout its existence. Initially installed at San Francisco’s Lawson de Celle Gallery (there’s a photo of Harvey Milk dropping by to check out the exhibition), the series was then reproduced in a mail-order book, with individual images also available for purchase as postcards, packaged in the same brown paper used to cocoon explicit material. Scanning the ephemera, I realized that I had first come across Fischer’s work as an illicit copy, on a club flyer that repurposed one of the photographs to sassy effect.

•

At the packed opening for Gay Semiotics a friend and I remark on how Fischer’s subjects — especially the men in the “Street Fashion” section — look like any number of gay men who you see perched with their laptops in Mission cafes or crowding The Eagle during the beer bust. The men who show up in my Facebook feed in photos acquaintances post of long nights out or group hikes in Marin are now staring at me from the gallery’s tall, white walls.

When I get home I re-read Johnny Ray Huston’s essay about the late San Francisco filmmaker Curt McDowell. McDowell arrived at the SF Art Institute close to the Summer of Love but he didn’t need it; he was already such a fantastic pervert, so clear about who and what he wanted. Johnny writes about Curt’s movies — their corona of desire, the messy hunger that drives them — but he’s also writing about his own desire vis-a-vis a new form of gay semiotics: “I thumb an app and see a dozen guys who resemble Curt, lined up in rows. None of them are like him. They list their interests as selling points, presenting curated lives. A vintage San Francisco look is still available, but the facsimiles of thrift-store finds of 1971 are hundreds times more expensive today. I draw strength from the fact that pleasure and truth are still free.”

If, as Dean and Bersani would have it, clones make good on the possibility of repetition with a difference, then what difference is registered by the reappearance of gay semiotics now, among the affected vintage aficionados Huston scrolls past on his smartphone? Or in the graphic design sensibilities of the current gay dance underground? Or in more mainstream media representations of “post-” contemporary gay life, such as HBO’s Looking, which had such a problematic relationship to the very history it blithely used as window dressing?

Encountering Gay Semiotics four decades on, it is difficult not to view Fischer’s images as indexes for absence. I can’t help but wonder, morbidly, if their models are still alive. AIDS is the obvious reason for this but I don’t want it to be the only one, the thing that any encounter with loss must necessarily be thought through when discussing gay history after the seventies. My boyfriend points out that this absence is attributable to other factors too: aging, changing aesthetic preferences, gentrification. Circling back to “historical distance” as an explanation depersonalizes things too much for me. Maybe I’m afraid that depersonalization is the difference, when I think about what makes citation in 1977 more erotic than a contemporary citation of 1977.

•

However tongue-in-cheek Gay Semiotics comes across, it still makes clear that its subject matter was born out of utility as much as sensibility. The “rough tools of proof” Fisher cataloged, to borrow Sontag’s phrasing, put one’s sexual availability and tastes out there for a self-selecting audience who was equally in the know and on the hunt. Now, men who have sex with men have moved on to different protocols, different scenes, different signs. Fischer himself anticipated that the codes would invariably shift: “As economic, political and social levels of interaction fluctuate, the uses of the language will broaden and new, more evolved — overt as well as covert — terms will come into use.”

I write this essay at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court is only weeks away from an expected ruling in favor of same sex marriage, the Castro and SOMA are neighborhoods now shaped more by residents’ income bracket than their sexuality, and AIDS is no longer the inevitable terminus of a positive HIV diagnosis. The “uses of the language” have broadened to the point where the poses and paraphernalia of Gay Semiotics are now relics to be re-appropriated, regardless of the intent behind one’s approach.

“Is there a way to preserve or repurpose something of gayness, even as its primacy fades?” sighs Slate critic J. Bryan Lowder. “[…] for those still interested — for those who still need it — how might we go about being gay in a world where that’s now truly a choice?” I sympathize with Lowder’s questions because, as a gay man who has formulated his own sense of identity partly through a preoccupation with now-outmoded gay aesthetics, I’ve frequently asked them of myself. They are also questions that are taken up by Gay Semiotics, which is both a record of its time and a self-reflexive exploration of how such records get made and for whom.

“Ultimately the clone represents an image of sameness, as well as of desirability, and thus a figure for imaginary identity,” writes Dean. “He makes the image of what one might have and the image of what one might want be the same image.” But for me, Fischer’s clones represent the opposite: an irrevocable split between what I can presently access of the past and what I might desire from it. Sending signals and inviting glances from across this temporal gulf, these men are both specimen and specters. For a moment, I attempt to hold them apart from Fischer’s mediation of their likenesses, and try and return their gaze.

]]>http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/nothing-that-meets-the-eye-notes-on-clones/feed/5http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/nothing-that-meets-the-eye-notes-on-clones/Juana Berrío on Tacita Deanhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sfmoma/blog/~3/bQI34aMdB4g/ http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/juana-berrio-on-tacita-dean/#commentsMon, 01 Jun 2015 16:00:09 +0000http://openspace.sfmoma.org/?p=59671Our One on One series features artists, writers, poets, curators, and others from around the country, responding to works in SFMOMA’s collection. You can follow it here.

Tacita Dean, still from <i>Day for Night</i>, 2009

Juana Berrío

Over the past few years, I have been thinking about Italo Calvino’s short essay “Why Read the Classics?” from the perspective of contemporary art — rather than from its given subject of literature. Instead of providing us with a series of moralizing reasons why we should read the classics, Calvino lists fourteen definitions of what a literary classic might be. What he proposes is that the notion of the classic comes from the very practice of reading and — most importantly — from rereading. For him, the classics are books that resist being framed in a fixed time or intellectual context because they “have never finished saying what they have to say,” and because they “come down to us bearing upon them the traces of readings previous to ours, bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through.”

I like thinking about Calvino’s definitions as a means of understanding the way contemporary visual artworks are often also re-engagements with intellectual and aesthetic concerns from previous times and cultural contexts. In my opinion, what makes an artwork contemporary is not its date of production, or its “up-to-date” look, or its direct response to current issues and events. On the contrary, I believe that what makes an artwork contemporary is the way an artist rereads and re-contextualizes previous forms of cultural knowledge and makes them relevant to his or her own time. In this sense, the content and meaning of a classic — whether a book or an artwork — is an ever-growing series of re-readings of questions and observations that are inherent to our most basic human conditions.

For example, it is not uncommon to find contemporary artworks that reread other artworks or are in dialogue with other artists, either recent or ancient. We see this in works that are made afterso-and-so, or that use appropriation as a means of aesthetic and intellectual creation, or that are made with the purpose of reinterpretation, opposition, distortion, tribute or satire. The work I want to talk about is Day for Night (2009), a film by British artist Tacita Dean, which is in dialogue with Italian artist Giorgio Morandi and his life-long painting practice. In this case, the conversation spans a century, as Morandi was born in 1890 and died in 1964, while Dean was born one year later, in 1965.

Tacita Dean, still from <i>Day for Night</i>, 2009

Day for Night is a 16mm color film composed of twenty different still and silent shots, each approximately thirty seconds long. What we see in each of the frames are close-ups of arrangements of aged domestic objects displayed in a seemingly random order: ceramic vases and glass bottles of different shapes appear accompanied by rectangular containers; metal jars and pots are presented upside down or in the background next to ceramic bowls, boxes, and carafes; old dry flowers, still inside some of the vases, are juxtaposed with oil lanterns and a few other vases. All of these objects belonged to the Italian painter and printmaker Giorgio Morandi.

We know Morandi thanks to the many stunning still life paintings and prints he made over the course of some fifty-plus years. Departing from the “ordinary” theme of the still life, his works profoundly embraced and made “extraordinary” the concept of time via repetition, slowness, and light. After he was conscripted into the Italian army in 1915, the year Italy joined World War I, Morandi was indefinitely discharged due to a nervous breakdown he suffered while in service. He moved back to his family house and, in the midst of two world wars, studied and painted the same collection of bottles and vases for the rest of his life. These are the objects Tacita Dean filmed for Day for Night.

To shoot the film, Dean went to no. 36 via Fondazza in Bologna, the house where Morandi lived and worked most of his life with his mother and his three unmarried sisters, and where his collection of objects still remains today. Dean also produced a second film named Still Life at this house, which then provided the title to a larger solo exhibition of her film works at Palazzo Dugnani in Milan in 2009, where these two films premiered along with fourteen other existing works. Day for Night is one of many portraits of artists Dean has made throughout her career, including films about Merce Cunningham, Mario Merz, Cy Twombly, Claes Oldenburg, and Julie Mehretu.

Giorgio Morandi, <i>Natura morta (Still Life)</i>, 1952

Tacita Dean has produced over forty 16mm films as well as drawings, photographs, and texts. Often using the fleeting nature of light as a compositional and conceptual tool, she places notions of absence and the inevitable passage of time at the core of her practice. Her films include The Green Ray (2001), in which she tries to capture an unexplained atmospheric phenomenon; or Fernsehturm (2001), which was shot in the slowly-rotating restaurant at the top of Berlin’s TV Tower.

Day for Night once again picks up on the theme of time and light, since Morandi’s work is so inextricably linked to the endless hours, weeks, and decades he spent painting the same objects. His many paintings show that he arranged and re-arranged them over and over again, creating different but always rigorous compositions under a bright, unifying light that highlighted both their simple geometric shapes and their two-dimensional presence. In Dean’s film, the notion of light and temporality gains a whole new layer: it turns seemingly static objects into slow ones. Not only does she shoot long still shots of the objects, but she shows how slow these objects actually are and how slow their lives have been over the past century, which contrasts with how quickly the world has changed around them. Dean shoots each object in a way that singles it out from the larger group by placing one or the other center frame, or by focusing the lens on a particular part of the arrangement — sometimes on an object in the foreground, other times in the background — highlighting their individual characteristics and the various ways each of them has aged. We see their scars, the layers of dust accumulated in some parts of their bodies, as we also see Morandi’s brushstrokes and the monochromatic sheets of paper he used to cover them so as to control their flat tones and geometric shapes.

Dean’s film also reveals the surface on which all the objects have been resting for several decades: What seems like a flat tabletop covered with a large sheet of paper contains many scratches or circular drawings overlapping each other, similar to the marks left on the surface of an ice-rink. These marks were the many studies Morandi made as he moved the objects around, methodically following a rhythmic system he had invented.

“Day for Night” is a term used to describe a cinematographic technique that uses a particular camera lens to turn a scene filmed during daylight into a night-scene. In other words, it’s about capturing an image and re-presenting it under a different “light.” In that same sense, Dean’s film is an act of rereading the life and work of Morandi. While these are the objects that Morandi observed for endless hours, what we see in the film are the witnesses, or the relics, of this very act of contemplation. Unlike the other portrait films Dean has made, we don’t see Morandi or his actual paintings, but instead the material leftovers of the artist’s life. In this sense, Day for Night is not necessarily a portrait of Morandi, but a silent sequence of individual portraits of Morandi’s objects, which have never finished saying what they have to say, and that continue to live on despite the absence of the artist’s hand. Covered with an accumulation of dust, unique marks, and aged brushstrokes, these vases, boxes, and bowls have slowly become the materialization of time.

Juana Berrío (b. 1979, Bogotá, Colombia) is the director and curator of Kiria Koula, a contemporary art gallery and bookstore located in San Francisco. She has worked as an Education Fellow at the New Museum in New York (2012) and at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2010-2011) and served as a curatorial assistant for Massimiliano Gioni (2013 Venice Biennale). As an independent curator and writer, she has been a contributor for Frog Magazine, Bielefelder Kunstverein, Kadist Foundation (Paris), and Look Lateral, among others.

]]>http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/juana-berrio-on-tacita-dean/feed/0http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/06/juana-berrio-on-tacita-dean/Five-Tone Kit: Lebbeus Woods & Carolinerhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sfmoma/blog/~3/n68EGqhlQDM/ http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/05/five-tone-kit-woods-caroliner/#commentsFri, 29 May 2015 16:00:40 +0000http://openspace.sfmoma.org/?p=59817This five-part series — named after a section of composer Lou Harrison‘s (1917-2003) Rhymes With Silver — pairs an image of San Francisco from the SFMOMA Collection with a piece of music also created in or indebted to the Bay Area at large. Subjectively construed, open to intimacy and conflict, these selections are fleeting studies in aural-geographic-temporal synonymy and disjunction. They’re also intended for the weekend, toward whatever end/opening.

As for Caroliner: talk about fractured. It’s hard to imagine many other entities for whom the genre “industrial bluegrass” feels so apt. From their delirious and heavily costumed shows to a ridiculous and ever-changing moniker (e.g. Caroliner Rainbow Brain Tool Imbued With Rust And Mold; Caroliner Rainbow Customary Relaxation of the Shale; Caroliner Rainbow Scrambled Egg Taken For a Wife), theirs is an aesthetic that continues — however unsettlingly — a long tradition of San Francisco Weird.

Here’s to shattering. At least there’s still room for some goofiness, some grace.

]]>http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/05/five-tone-kit-woods-caroliner/feed/0http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/05/five-tone-kit-woods-caroliner/On Being-Hated: Conceptualism, the Mongrel Coalition, the House That Built Me.http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sfmoma/blog/~3/HsAr6inwnuw/ http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/05/on-being-hated-conceptualism-the-mongrel-coalition-the-house-that-built-me/#commentsWed, 20 May 2015 15:56:28 +0000http://openspace.sfmoma.org/?p=59776

Author’s Note 5/20/2015: I believe that the essay below has deeply hurt my family, and although this might seem unnecessary, I would like to publicly acknowledge that most of the writing I do, that indeed they let me do, comes at real cost, hurt and pain to them. Because quite simply, all they want is for me to be happy. I am extremely regretful of that. I love you family, I’m sorry. And despite everything, thanks.

Editors’ Note 5/21/2015:Changes have been added to reflect that a reader at the Omni was a supporter rather than member of the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo, and that “threat aesthetic” was a term coined by Joyelle McSweeney and used by Tim Jones-Yelvington to first describe the Mongrel Coalition.

What does it mean to even be somewhere, be someone? My name is Trisha Low. I’m 26 years old and haven’t yet hit my Saturn returns. I’m Chinese, but I like horoscopes anyway; some people would call me Asian American, but I’ve lived too many places to understand what it’s really like to be from the USA. Among these places are Singapore, London, Philadelphia and New York. I grew up rich. My parents grew up poor. I grew up loved. Some argue that none of this matters to how, or what I write, but the truth is all of it does.

This series has purported to deal with many kinds of hatred. How one feels hated; the way it plays itself out like a cruel villain in a video game, seeping partially into intimate corners even when its movements read as scripted. How the materiality of being-hated gives affect rigidity a strange and symptomatic form when you might least expect it. Like Sara Ahmed says, hate might not be the opposite of love. But the truth is that why one is hated might in fact have a lot to do with it — how one is loved, that is; how much.

•

I live in Oakland but my parents live far away, in London, and my extended family even further, in Singapore and Hong Kong. My parents are in town and I’m supposed to get dinner with them but they’ve decided they’re not hungry so we’re sitting in their hotel room instead. I tell them I know that they’re just happy to see me — or in my mother’s words, “we’re happy just to sit here and look at you,” as though I’m a particularly interesting tourist attraction or some rare breed of snake — but that it might be good if we tried to, I don’t know, do something.

We don’t. I’m sitting in a hotel room with my parents because I love them, I rarely see them and I want to make them happy. I want to do what they want to do, so we’re watching a terrible television show they like, a Mandarin show called I Am a Singer! a spinoff of American Idol. Only it’s like what my dad told me when I was growing up: if you’re Chinese, you work harder, you do better than every other white person. Not just because they’re lazy (they are), but because you’re smarter and it’s your goddamn birthright. Appropriately, this show is bigger, brighter, but also kitschier — its greenish neon lights like a Disney version of American Idol, which tends toward a sleeker, Hollywood aesthetic. And unlike Idol, there are no amateurs here. Instead, every competitor is already a professional singer who just wants to prove themselves the best professional singer. Way to overachieve.

Like American Idol, interviews with contestants about their personal lives and how it relates to their choice of song are interspersed between the actual performances. But unlike the soppy love songs that seem standard for US competitions, here, every song is drenched in filial piety. One singer talks about how her father died but she feels like he’s always there, another about how emotional he gets every year at his mother’s birthday party, another about a news story in which two parents let go of a precariously dangling cable car, giving their lives in order to save their infant son. With every performance, singers weep on stage with the strength of their commitment to family, interspersed with close-up shots of the audience, who are crying, too; or listen intently with their chins up and their eyes closed, their faces radiant and strangely pure, innocent in the green light of the stage.

The singer on TV croons to her dead father: “It’s quiet, but I can feel your presence.” Against my will, I can feel myself crying. My dad pats me awkwardly on the back. I tell him I’m glad he’s here. I’m not lying.

•

It’s only been an hour, but I’m already in a fight with my parents. My mother tries to fix my hair, my wrist snaps at her, hard, she asks me if I’m hungry and I tell her god, I can feed myself. My dad asks me how the writing for the SFMOMA blog is going, and I remind him that he thinks that writing is an indulgence. He frowns and reminds me that I’ll do better than everyone else even if it is. That I’m not just Chinese, I’m his daughter. I hug him, but something skritches hard inside my belly and I feel a little nauseous, like I’m reminded of my unpayable debt, of how much I’m bound.

My father might hate performance art and love Abstract Expressionism but he has a fondness for contemporary Chinese art too, so he calls me over to his computer. I sit on his lap and he shows me a piece by Chinese performance artist Zhang Huan in a kind of adorable effort to meet my tastes halfway. The piece is called Family Tree. In it, Zhang Huan invites a number of calligraphers to paint texts on his face in Mandarin script, producing a series of photos showing the change in his portrait over time. Like a beautiful skin disease, the writing flows: first across his forehead, his cheeks, highlighting the contours of his face. But suddenly, along the set of photographs, something changes; his face crosses an invisible threshold. As ink accumulates, his features become increasingly obscured, he changes from recognizable person to inky object, his eyes white and vicious in the dark mass of his bald head.

Zhang Huan, <i>Family Tree</i>, 2000

I think the piece is a little easy. It’s too easy to read this gesture as an amplification of racialization, the fact that one is always marked to the extreme of being grotesque. Easy to see it raises the question of how to be a racialized artist and not always have one’s work read through the issue of identity, with every interpretive ambiguity always reduced to this undifferentiated markedness. But I see it a little differently. As I watch the contours of Zhang Huan’s face absorbed by the calligraphy, one of the oldest cultural forms of his Asian ancestry, I see instead how an emphasis on family ties might also erase all traces of his own individuality.

My dad has trouble with my reckless confessionalism. When I was growing up, he used to tell me that our ethical compass should calibrated according to what he affectionately titled “The Newspaper Test”, a digestible form of Confucianism. This is how it works: before you decide to do something, you should first imagine it being on the front page of the newspaper. If having the whole world read it might embarrass you or if it might, worse still, tarnish the reputation of your family, you should never, ever do it.

My dad asks if I like the piece and I nod yes, but this time, I am lying, because more than anything, in this piece I feel the impossibility of art to salvage oneself — to salvage me — from the internalized pull of cultural doctrine: my staunch filial piety. Zhang Huan says, in his artist’s statement that the face is a kind of divination, in the way your cheek swells, or in the thickness of your ear. Even if Chinese children are taught more than anything that work is all that matters, that you can achieve anything if you just do the work, they are also taught that there are some things you just can’t walk away from. You don’t get to choose your family.

My father used to be an economics professor and a card-carrying communist, but then he decided to have a family. He became an investment banker so he could give his kids the education he had to break his back to earn, and then he quit. Now he works in the restaurant industry, but somewhere along the way, he became a libertarian anyway (he calls me his “bleeding-heart daughter.”) Nowadays, people like to think about love in a way that suggests it can destabilize sovereignty, as though a commitment to radical love could even the playing field. Shulamith Firestone writes, “I submit that love is essentially a much simpler phenomenon­­ — it becomes complicated, corrupted, or obstructed by an unequal balance of power.” It’s true, a belief in the redemptive power of love outside of power could be a matter of ideology. Firestone might ultimately believe in the possibility of a purer love, but I’m not sure I agree that love can be a different drug — that we can do it faster, snort it cleaner. As James Baldwin writes, “power is real, and many things, including, very often, love, cannot be achieved without it.”

What could it mean to sacrifice your ideology as an indulgence in favor of the material practicalities of showing love? For my father, this variation on Confucianism is what our heritage is really about. Maybe it’s just how deeply I’ve internalized what I was taught, but for me, family is the clearest evidence of the impossibility of love’s salvation.

My mother tells me I’m twenty-six, at my most fertile, and that I should really think about freezing my eggs because it’s clear I’m not going to get married or even think about having kids any time soon. I feel frustrated, like I’m a disappointment. I can feel myself being deeply unreasonable, I slam the door and think god, I hate them; that I loathe everything they stand for, the nuclear family and moral conservatism and religion and capitalism. I want to abolish it all.

But the truth is, I can only feel one thing. Despite it all, I only feel wrenchingly ungrateful. The truth is, despite how deeply implicated my parents might be in the heterocapitalistpatriarchy, I will never be ashamed of how they did what they had to do to allow me to learn what I now know, even if our ethics will now always be fundamentally opposed.

My parents grew up poor. I grew up rich. It’s impossible not to feel as though my parents gifted me my disobedience. I know this isn’t entirely true — that even if for me, writing is an expression of my class position, that many poor writers have been autodidacts, worked even harder to be able to write. But I was taught that my ideology is a privilege, as is my ability to write, or make art, or to even consider these activities as any kind of real option. And I will never not acknowledge, never disavow it, even on the day that the world ends or the revolution comes; and I am the first to throw myself upon the guillotine.

I’m yelling and crying at my mother and vice versa, about how she won’t understand why I’m doing what I’m doing, and she’s crying and yelling about why I don’t love her enough to put my love for her above everything else, like she has for me. Despite it all, there’s still no hatred here, only love. And sometimes, I fucking hate myself for it.

•

I’m writing this on Microsoft Word for Mac, 2011 v. 14.4.0 on an Apple laptop computer OS X v. 10.9.3. It’s 5:14 p.m. in the afternoon on a Friday and I’m telling you what platform I’m writing on and when, because I’m writing about poetry, and timestamping is a formal tic I picked up from Conceptual writing. It’s is a gesture which Conceptualism itself borrowed from the New York School, and years later, feels already outmoded, but I’m fond of it anyway. When I learned about Conceptual writing in Kenny Goldsmith’s class ENGL 111, Uncreative Writing, I was excited by the possibilities of writing a different way, using techniques and procedures that acknowledged and mirrored the kinds of restrictions that I’ve felt in my own life. It seemed riskier than the disorganizing logic of a fragmented lyric, and I liked the possibilities that arose from the fact that context could also be content and that the reception of work could be art as much as what was being presented. It taught me about exposure and risk, allowed me to find my own practice of antagonism and claustrophobia, taught me how to fill a room with saturated affect, how powerful for audiences this can be.

It’s 5:52 p.m. in the afternoon on a Friday and everyone else is probably preparing to go to a reading that I want to go to because even though I don’t think I’ll like it, I think it’s important to give everyone the respect of engaging with their work, especially if you disagree. “I like to know what I hate, intimately,” I tell Alli Warren, but we both know what I’m actually saying means it’s no hatred at all. One of the readers is a supporter of the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo, an anonymous collective whose aim is to dislodge what they see as an imperialist, white supremacist project of Conceptual poetry via what they term a “threat aesthetic” (a term coined by Joyelle McSweeney and used by Tim Jones-Yelvington to first describe the Mongrel Coalition). This manifests in a trolling and shaming of both the general community and specific persons aggressively online. Some of their targets include Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, whose notorious Statement of Facts trilogy, comprised of explicit transcripts from her work as a criminal defense attorney for sex offenders, was crucial to me as a younger writer.

The Mongrel Coalition’s not wrong. Recently, Kenny made a much contested and reviled piece in which he appropriated the autopsy report on Michael Brown for a reading he gave at Brown University. This piece disgusts me, I feel it is deeply hurtful; callous given the continuing state-sactioned violences inflicted upon brown and black bodies. It doesn’t implicate Kenny himself, or his subject position, nor acknowledge his complicity in wider structures of violent and oppressive racism. When I find out about it, I cry.

Recently, one of Vanessa Place’s old pieces has resurfaced. It’s a systematic retweeting of Margaret Mitchell’s 1935 novel, Gone With The Wind, this time subtitled “by Vanessa Place” on a Twitter account. It’s partly a provocation against the notoriously litigious estate of Margaret Mitchell, and more specifically, a gesture that would invite the estate to once again sue to recover ownership of its racist text. It’s partly intended to aggressively admit her white complicity in an embedded cultural racism by reproducing racist speech under her own name. The racial kitsch and imagery of Mammy that accompanies the account is deeply disturbing and difficult to bear.

In an artist’s statement released on May 18, Vanessa states that she is sorry for hurting people of color, but not sorry for confronting a white poetry audience with how they are necessarily implicated in a national history of oppression. She also writes: “It is also a cruelty to insist that only people of color be responsible for the articulation or the embodiment of race, to bear the burden of my history as well as the history of this oppression.” I do agree with this. And because I’m also interested in inflicting cruelty on audiences, I kind of understand what Vanessa is trying to do. But the fact that I’ve taken a half hour trying to describe, in one paragraph, the intellectual calisthenics that would prove that her piece “addresses racism” by embodying it, really means the provocation is really actually too easy — painfully easy. It reproduces racism in order to confront white people with it more intensely, while simultaneously hurting even more intensely people of color. Which means it’s actually just a racist project.

I don’t understand how either Kenny or Vanessa think the blank mask of Art or Poetry can be a good enough reason for undifferentiated provocation, anything but a flimsy foil. I don’t understand how Kenny’s rhetoric of textual neutrality and objectivity is so willing to ignore the context of his subject position. And I might like work that comes at a cost to the author, especially if it’s because of an admission of privilege. But I don’t understand how Vanessa thinks the cost of this piece, for her, can compare to the pain it’s causing people of color — a pain she couldn’t possibly understand.

Instead, these pieces seem to bolster the notoriety, power, assimilative reach of their specific authorial brands. And because my relationships with both writers are ones from which I have clearly benefited, I feel torn and sick; if this is Conceptualism, I want it destroyed. But I can’t not admit learning how to write from it either. You don’t get to choose your family.

It’s 6:02 p.m. on a Friday and I want to go to the reading because I respect the Mongrel Coalition and I would like to engage this poet’s work, but I’m sitting here writing this instead, because even if I might think I’ve oedipalized, I won’t not admit that Kenny published my first piece of work in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, that he hugged me and let me take a sip of his gin when I told him about how another poet had broken my heart. I feel implicated, complicit. I don’t just get to walk away from that guilt. I won’t let myself.

•

I’m on the internet, like I always am, reading Mongrel Coalition tweets about how I, Trisha Low, should publicly denounce Conceptualism, or Kenny Goldsmith, or Vanessa Place, about how otherwise I’ll just be a race traitor, worse still, be accused of some kind of Asian American docility. I don’t understand what we’re talking about anymore, how an aesthetic affiliation has become conflated with the polemic and practice of two specific individuals. I have a tattoo on my right inner thigh that says “traitor” because I don’t believe in mercy for selves. Everyone’s some kind of traitor, it’s just a matter of whether or not you want to admit it.

But reading Mongrel Coalition tweets, I’m so mad, watching hordes of white poets clicking “Like” on social media as though that could be any real examination of themselves, of their own practices or their specific actions, their day-to-day movements through the world. I find it hard to believe that none of these people have any internalized racism, or symptomatically fucked up liberal white guilt. I can’t help but feel that all it is is a self-satisfied materialization of the same white guilt that’s now being rewarded — a simple way to relieve themselves of the crucial burden of thinking about their own accountability or complicity. I’m mad because at the end of the day, it literally costs white poets nothing to click a button in support of an ultimately undifferentiated anti-imperialist non-racism. Good job, you get a cookie!

I see some white boy click the “Like” button on a denouncement of Vanessa Place and it just seems to me as though they’re — by our new logic — automatically deemed innocent. But let’s be honest, I’m not sure their ironized hip hop poem is really doing anything better.

Because the truth is, even the white poets who are being attacked by the Mongrel Coalition, arguing with vitriol and abandon on countless Facebook threads and Twitter streams get some kind of respite. Even if not “liking” what they do is equivalent to a condemnable silence, white writers get to go home and stop thinking about race. If you are a white poet, being for or against the Mongrel Coalition comes at almost no cost to you. But if you are a person of color, on either side, it feels like everything comes at a cost, emotionally, aesthetically, personally. We never get to walk away.

With the Mongrel Coalition come real questions of what it means to write as a person of color. And although I’m glad these questions have been raised, answering each one feels like another complication, another emotional labor: about the ways in which race has been made legible in aesthetics and how problematic assumptions about that legibility can be, about whether racial heritage must always be engaged positively, about whether a person of color’s work will always either be reducible to one’s identity position or a “passing whiteness” via aesthetic strategies they choose to engage, about assimilationist impulses and the value of being honest about them, about gratitude and lineage, about the grand institution of Poetry that has a history, beyond Conceptualism, of structural racism and cultural appropriation. Answering any of these questions has real consequences for the way I look at myself, my identity, my work, the way I want to write, read, be read.

And even if I know that all of this just means we don’t have the luxury of neutrality (“You’re either with us or against us!”), I don’t believe that any of these issues can be organized purely into two sides; racist or not, that it can ever be equivalent to Conceptual or not. But now that someone’s built a wall, I just can’t with both sides; I can’t land on either. Because I know, too, that if you’re a person of color, to be on either side or in between, it doesn’t matter — it will always be exhausting.

I watch the Mongrel Coalition attack other people who they decide aren’t on their side; people of color, queer writers. Calling out racist work by white writers is a necessary and crucial anti-racist project. But I watch them leverage Kenny and Vanessa’s brands of Conceptualism to arbitrarily attack other writers on Twitter, in a strange conflation of political and aesthetic warfare. Not that the two aren’t related. Sometimes, I see the connection. But a lot of the time, I have no idea what those being attacked, their practices or their work have to do with either. I’m going to go ahead and say: nothing.

I’m sitting here writing this because I don’t care what kind of anti-racist poem you make or how many things you like on Facebook, or how many times you say you denounce anyone. Because even if you’re a supporter of the Mongrel Coalition — hell, even if you’re a Mongrel — everyone has their own institutional complicities and no one should fucking get to walk away.

•

It’s a few years ago. I’m 22 years old. I don’t know what Conceptualism means anymore, but who cares, I have to go to the NeMLA conference in Rochester to give a ridiculous paper about dildos and Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser and the cumshot anyway. Rochester is awful. I don’t know Holly Melgard and Joey Yearous-Algozin all that well but I call them up and they drive the hour and half from Buffalo to pick me up in the middle of a disgusting St. Patrick’s Day parade, sloppy with the sheen of spilled beer and green tinsel. We sit on their porch and eat ice cream sandwiches and talk about the last reading I gave in which I refused to read any Conceptual poetry because I believe that one has to oedipalize in order to make work that could even begin to have any risk, and I didn’t feel like I had gotten to that point yet. I say, “I know I was terrible, I’m sorry!” and Holly confirms this, laughing, but tells me it’s okay because she’s only interested in watching writers struggle.

What would it mean to oedipalize? Holly tells us she heard an amazing rumor that Marjorie Perloff got to excise the parts of Kenny’s Soliloquy that she didn’t like, and we laugh at what a great project it would be if we could just publish the excised parts as a PDF. Holly and Joey propose that what we should think about is the waste and excess and exhaustion Conceptualism’s sleek project produces, because if Conceptualism is about fitness, we’re only interested in what is unfit for consumption, and how that could reflect the unfitness of the author. Because authorship is not pure and blank and dead like Kenny and Vanessa have proposed — rather, it’s ugly and useless, always mutated by whatever platform it chooses. Every platform, contains a struggle.

Real family is difficult for me, even if I will never disavow them, so I have chosen family too. And over the years, Holly and Joey, and other writers who feel the same and make work that is weird and ugly and unfit: Steve and Josef and Diana and Rob and Kim; Lanny and Gordon and Chris and so many more, they became chosen family too. I don’t know what Conceptualism means any more; if it an aesthetic practice, even a lineage. Should it be assigned to me or my peers? I might not have any say in this, but I do know that I will never disavow my chosen family. I will yell at them for the fucked up thing they did or wrote or said; have yelled at them for the fucked up things they’ve done or wrote or said; know that they might betray me and I them; that we’ll write weird poems about sex or not having sex; about burning cop cars, or 9/11 or Black Flag together or apart; but I will never disavow them.

It doesn’t really matter. We might not even identify that way, but to the rest of the world, we’re just a bunch of undifferentiated Conceptualists. To other people, we’re just another part of a machine they can recognize with utter clarity. A brand might be something that distinguishes a product, but it is also about consumption. It devours, it buys up the market so no one can see autonomy of objects. But I hate this metaphor. Not one of my freak family makes work in the same way anyway. I’m sitting here writing a personal essay, for fuck’s sake. In Joey’s words, “I would hate it, but it’s you, so I guess I’ll read it.” I guess it just looks different from the outside.

Another word for brand is legacy. Legacy is something that the head of a family is obligated to create and maintain, a title under which everything that’s descended from it has to be marked. Sometimes it just feels like that Conceptualism, the brand (and its family reputation), plastered all over the front page of the newspaper or Facebook or Twitter, just lets it win again.

I heard a rumor that Kenny was saying how no one makes a good book before they’re 25, someone raises me as a counter-example and he says that I would never have made that book if not for that fact that he taught me how.

I’m at a conference and Vanessa teases me in her response to my paper about personifying Bourdieu’s “youngest” and later gives me a snickerdoodle, smiling wryly, saying, “let it never be said that I did not care for the youth.” I’m hungry so I think it’s kind, that there’s some self-deprecation in the condescension.

I’m mad about these things too.

God, I hate my parents. I hate my parents but they fucking put me through college. I’d rather admit my indebtedness to a problematic structure than pretend it can be disappeared with a simple denial. To publicly denounce Kenny or Vanessa should not be a Get Out of Jail Free pass for my own complicities nor for anyone else’s. Perhaps it’s easier to be part of a false communitarian innocence built on a rejection of a single aesthetic practice or individual, no matter how deserved that rejection may be. But let’s face it: if we’re going to burn it down, we’re going to have to burn it all down.

I think of Zhang Huan’s inky face and feel myself sinking further in the mire. I’m sitting here writing this because even if they’ve shown me kindness, I’ll reject Kenny or Vanessa’s assimilative authorial brands, I’ll reject their racist poems, but I won’t disavow my chosen family, won’t not admit my complicity in a structure that has raised me.

•

I’m so mad. I’m mad because no one in my chosen freak family will say anything about this publicly because they’re too anxious about their position as white, or straight, or whatever, when I feel I’ve been pulling all this weight. I’m mad because people of color are fighting each other in ways that come only at a cost to them; for white poets, it’s just a matter of watching and clicking, the cheapest kind of support. I’m mad at a man of color for leveraging sexist, gendered language against a supporter of the Mongrel Coalition just to prove his point. I’m mad at the Mongrel Coalition for attacking more people of color and queer women than straight white men. I’m mad at Kenny and Vanessa for making some racist poems that aren’t even good art, I’m even madder that they don’t understand that they have to be accountable for the hurt they’ve caused and that sometimes, you just have to say you’re wrong. I’m mad that I have to take a side just because someone else built the wall for me in the first place and I’m even madder that I have to write this because I feel forced to publicly qualify why I just don’t believe it’s as simple as that. I’m mad at the white people who are lazy readers and thinkers and refusing to engage issues of race and aesthetics in more complex or complicated or negative ways because the truth is they just don’t have to think about it. I’m mad that racism in poetry seems like it’s currently being reduced to a simple matter of one aesthetic movement, a handful of white writers, and other persons of color who might politically or aesthetically disagree with the Mongrel Coalition. I’m mad at myself that I feel, still, indebted or grateful, to anything or anyone. I am so mad, but I don’t hate anybody; not one bit, except for maybe myself.

I read Baldwin writing, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

It hurts.

•

I see JT, a beautiful friend, poet and supporter of the Mongrel Coalition in New York and we know we disagree, that things between us have been difficult because of it. We hug and we yell at each other, “we’re in a fight, but I love you, I love you but we’re in a fight,” all the way down the street as we say goodbye.

I’m reminded of the section in James Baldwin’s essays The Fire Next Time wherein he encounters Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam. They meet at Muhammad’s mansion right before Baldwin is about to get drinks with white friends, artists and activists — people he says he would trust with his life — somewhere downtown. There’s a strong sense of mutual respect between the two. But despite this respect, as Baldwin leaves, says his goodbyes, he knows that because of his differences there’s more of a chance that he and Muhammad will gradually become enemies than there is that Muhammad’s prophecy of the fall of the white devil’s reign will be fulfilled. Anyone leaving the mansion is offered a ride in a car, protection from white violence so they are safely delivered to their next location. Ironically, Baldwin is delivered safely downtown to his white friends.

I was sitting with someone not too long ago and we were talking about love. It was making me miserable, I said, all this loving, I didn’t know why I spent so much time wanting it, scheming how to get it, weighing up fears and anxieties to try to come to some definitive conclusion as to whether or not it existed. And they said to me, if love is the most of your problems, then you should really reconsider your priorities, because there are way worse problems to have.

There are way worse problems people do have. The world is burning and I am worrying about love. Fuck love. The thing about being loved is that you run the risk of becoming too afraid of no longer being loveable. But fuck being loveable too, and the restraint that comes with it. Someone on either side will hate me for at least one of the things that I’ve said here, but I’d rather be hated. And being-hated is most difficult when the very reason you are hated is that there are people you love from whom you don’t just get to walk away. Everything comes at a cost. But I would rather be hated by either side than say something that I don’t believe.

Sometimes when your loves are conflicting, being-hated by both sides is painful and comes at the cost of everything. But always, I would rather deal in pain.